What Claudia Fleming’s Eggplant Tart Taught Me - No. 211

How to make a complicated recipe easier. The merry month of May continues with a fabulous appetizer and May wine, too.

EVEN BEFORE I WROTE THE CAKE MIX DOCTOR, I could break down something complicated into manageable parts. I am not sure where I learned this trick. It might have been overhearing a math tutor instruct one of my children how to survive calculus!

Or it was just living…Planting a vegetable garden, sewing a dress with sleeves and a hidden zipper, leaving a career and moving all of my worldly possessions to England, restoring an old limestone farmhouse, recently writing a book about baking in the American South—just break them into manageable parts, I said to myself.

So when I glanced at a famous pastry chef’s recipe in her 2022 book simply called Delectable, the follow-up to her famed 2001 The Last Course, I knew I could streamline Claudia Fleming’s Eggplant Caponata Tart with all of its hoity-toity homemade puff pastry, frying of eggplant, cream sauce and glaze. I saw her lovely recipe in four parts. And I confidently thought, I’ll cheat on one, shorten the second, modify the third, and see if I really need the fourth.

Who is Claudia Fleming and why is she important?

Claudia Fleming is the pastry chef’s pastry chef. She is Long Island-born, Paris-taught, and created the legendary desserts at the Gramercy Tavern in New York from 1994-2002 and birthed her own style of pastry that is sophisticated and yet clean. She blurred sweet and savory and is credited with the now-legendary chocolate caramel tart flecked with sea salt. While pairing fruit with buttermilk panna cotta, she brought new attention to dessert - the last course - thus influencing a whole generation of pastry chefs who worship her like a rock star.

I was anxious to bake something from her new book, Delectable.

It was an Eggplant Caponata Tart that began with puff pastry baked and spread with caponata - a sweet and sour chunky sauce of eggplant, peppers, onions, and olives - then dolloped with a ricotta and Parmesan cream, dotted with cherry tomatoes, and brushed with creme fraiche before baking and broiling.